News You Can Bruise for 2023 August

Tue Aug 01 2023 00:23 July Film Roundup: Sumana was out for most of the month, so it was back to my usual tricks of watching obscure crime films from the 1960s and 1970s.

• The Moonshine War (1970): Hollywood studios in 1970 know that audiences crave antiheroes! I like a good antihero but I did not like this at all, possibly because it pitted antihero against antihero. Who do you root for at that point?
• There Was A Crooked Man... (1970): Hollywood studios in 1970 know that audiences crave Midcentury Medieval! Also, antiheroes. I am closing in on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) from both directions and it does seem to be the watershed people say it was. (Haven't seen it yet.) This, by contrast, was an okay Western that is front-loaded with its best scene by far. Just watch the first scene, I'd say. It also has the earliest sympathetic portrayal of a gay couple I've seen, so you could watch it for that. Oh, there's a food fight, too, but it's too cynical to feel fun.

  This film was filmed inside a national park and involved the very careful creation and demolition of one of the biggest location sets ever to avoid ecological impact. Was it really worth it?

• Asteroid City (2023): If you go to see a Wes Anderson movie in the theater and you don't sit in the middle seat, I don't even know why you're going. Everyone else in the theater with me disagreed, which gave me an unobstructed view of all those neatly organized tool racks and tidy diner menuboards. Basically, this was a fun series of sketches with gorgeous typography.

  Asteroid City is also the rare comedy that dares to drive all of the characters crazy during the movie. (cf. Down By Law) The driving-everyone-crazy is obviously inspired by the real-world experience of the pandemic, but I'll take it. However, now that I'm writing the review, a negative aspect of the film is coming back to me, which is that this sucker is layered under so many layers of metafiction and lampshading that it feels like a defense mechanism. Is there a serious point here? Should I be feeling some kind of way or are we just having fun with a live-action Road Runner cartoon? Is this secretly Birdman?

• The French Dispatch (2021): Yes, I came out of Asteroid City and needed more Wes Anderson, I'm not ashamed to admit it. This held together a lot better than Asteroid City, possibly because the sketches were well-defined by the framing device. Recommended.
• After the Fox (1966): I came for the Peter Sellers heist, I stayed for the film industry parody, but I didn't enjoy either one a whole lot, so I don't recommend you come for either. The Neil Simon screenplay has some great gags, including the final shot, but there's so much stuff in between the gags that I think this one is best left in the vault. So instead of going into detail I'll highlight two of the less famous actors:

  First, I was really struck by how much Victor Mature's role in this movie reminded me of that ingratiating fidgety character Martin Short is always doing. I don't know what part of this is intentional but it feels like there's something there. Second, I want to put a word in for Martin Balsam, a "that guy" character actor I first saw in the MST3K Mitchell episode. I've seen him in a couple other things since and he's always solid. I think this is the first comedic role I've seen him in and he does a good job as the one reasonable guy in an insane situation. In our house we call this the Mikey Day role, after all the SNL sketches where Mikey Day is the straight man who spends the whole sketch saying "What is happening?" in an ever more exasperated tone.

• How to Steal a Million (1966): 1966 was just a year for mediocre heist movies. Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole wanted one too, and they got this one. The best thing I'll say about this one is that the basic premise—hiring a fake art thief to steal a fake statue to avoid an insurance examination—is nice and twisted; even Coen-ish, if the Coens were in a playful mood.
• What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968): Taken in the cinematic context of the time, this is old Hollywood desperately trying to win the youth back over by saying that beatniks aren't cool, cutting your hair and getting married is cool. But the youth have already seen Bonnie and Clyde and there's no going back. Nothing special. However, taken in the context of our time, this is a mind-blowing comedy about the incompetent government response to an epidemic.
  

  OK, call it whatever you want. Beat by beat, the plot reveals one echo after another, including some now-sinister moments as America's cutie-pie Mary Tyler Moore does her best to infect everyone in New York City with the virus by sabotaging masks and encouraging large gatherings. If I had to explain the existence of this movie I'd point out that both of the screenwriters probably had childhood memories of living in large cities during the 1918 flu pandemic.

  Characters who are obvious parodies of J. Edgar Hoover aren't uncommon in movies from this period; Dom Deluise has his J. Gardner Monroe in this film, but there's also Sheldon Leonard in The Brinks Job, who plays a laughable buffoon named "J. Edgar Hoover." Mayor John Lindsay, now largely forgotten, is the reason so many movies of the period are filmed in New York, and his feeding hand gets bitten by a (from our perspective) disproportionate number of filmmakers. But What's So Bad About Feeling Good? dares to take on the true power broker, depicting a virus-infected Robert Moses pastiche and his proposal to tear down the New York Stock Exchange and replace it with a playground.

  The trained toucan in this movie was cute and had good comic timing. And finally, I have to say the movie has a point. There was a lot of bullshit in the 1960s counterculture, and although What's So Bad About Feeling Good? is soaked in the same cultural cesspit and not equipped to make an effective critique, it does at least notice the problem.

• The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976): I don't usually have this problem but I couldn't see George Segal as a womanizing card sharp in Gold Rush California. I kept seeing him as his laid-off aerospace exec character from Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), giving this movie the appearance of a surreal midlife crisis. That said, this was a decent Western/rom-com, a mix of genres that would never be greenlit as a movie today but makes perfect sense in the experimental 70s. Not great, but I don't watch movies no one remembers looking for "great." (It's fun when it happens, though.)

  Goldie Hawn is fun in this and I'm starting to get the feeling that she should have gotten more quality comedic roles than she did. I also wanted to note that this movie resurrects a Western stereotype last seen in Wagon Master (1950), by portraying Mormons as stern, disapproving Puritans who really love music. There's also a Jewish wedding in this movie. Not a movie that ignores the presence of religious minorities in the Old West, is what I'm saying.

• Boeing Boeing (1965): Not a crime movie, unless sexism be a crime. I've seen movies that never get better than their first scene, but the best part of Boeing Boeing is the title. Most of the movie is a static shot of a room with people running in and out of the doors... wait a minute... yes, this was based on a play. And not a good play. Pretty dull all around. To say some good things: Thelma Ritter's all right, and Jerry Lewis is bearable (a noteworthy occasion around these Film Roundup parts). And the idea of someone's philandering plans being thrown off by advances in aviation technology is at least theoretically funny.

I'll leave you with an animation I made from What's So Bad About Feeling Good?. I like to think this shot is an homage to one of my favorite film shots of all time: Brigitte Helm as the robot winking at the camera in Metropolis.

See you next time...

Wed Aug 02 2023 17:06 Sock breakthrough!: For about four years now I've been low-key searching for a replacement for my beloved Muji recycled-yarn socks, and I'm happy to report a breakthrough, thanks to another Japanese retail brand, Uniqlo. Here's the extremely detailed report:

The closest match I've found to the old Muji recycled-yarn socks are now Uniqlo's "melange socks"; a mix of cotton (80%), nylon (16%), polyester (3%) and spandex (1%). They don't feel as heavy as the previous champion (Muji right angle pile short socks), and I wore them through a recent heat wave with no problem. They even look like the old Muji socks, with a gradient of yarn colors, which makes me think they're manufactured with the same process.

Uniqlo melange socks are available as short socks and the misleadingly longer half socks. They are a little larger than the old Muji versions, which is okay with me as I always thought the Muji "short socks" were a little too small for my feet. Apart from that, the only real difference is the cotton-dominant fabric mix, where the recycled-yarn socks were mostly polyester.

Thanks to Sumana for dragging me into a nearby Uniqlo; otherwise I would not have found these.

Mon Aug 21 2023 10:37 How to (Finally) Follow Instructions: Way back in 2012 I gave a talk about hypermedia and code-on-demand called "How To Follow Instructions". I've always thought of it as my "lost" talk, one that could have been as influential as "Justice Will Take Us Millions of Intricate Moves". I've also convinced myself that this didn't happen because I never put the text of the talk online. Unlike most of my talks, I didn't write the script ahead of time, and transcribing it was a huge/expensive job.

But ten years later, Whisper makes it cheap and easy to do basic audio transcription with a laptop. I've used Whisper to transcribe my talk and edited it into what it should have been. Some of the talk has aged poorly: the same underlying technology that transcribes the audio also makes it possible for a computer to follow some of the human-readable "instructions" I mention in the talk. But I think it was pretty prescient at describing what was happening in the world of APIs and where we've gone over the intervening decade.